I’ve tried a few on my 2008ish macbook pro and they all work. Antix and MX work well as do the others. I know MX gets some hate on here, but it works. I did cheat and shoved an old SSD in there because it really sped things up.
Basically anything should work, I had one for a while running Arch + KDE. Wifi doesn’t work out of the box (thanks Broadcom), but once you install the right driver it’s perfectly fine.
That works to get it going, but it’s flaky. The older Broadcom chips need either the old reverse-engineered driver, or the old closed source driver Broadcom released.
whatever distro you choose, disable the nvidia graphics first. you’ll lose the display out but you’ll gain a cooler laptop with better autonomy. integrated graphics is more than enough to drive Plasma.
If you want to install linux because it doesn't support the newest mac os version i would recommend opencore patcher. I use it on my 2013 Macbook pro and it works perfectly fine on ventura(mac os 13) and should work fine on mac os 14
I think Pop OS might work on that model, and if it does, I would highly recommend it, as the DE is very similar to macOS. If I recall correctly, that distro also has multitouch trackpad functions that behave similar to those on the MacBook.
I’ve run both Opensuse Leap and Nixos with good luck. As someone else mentioned, it really just boils down to the wifi adapter being shit… But that aside, everyrhing else seemed to work well for me with leap and nix.
Nvidia breaks on me at least twice a year using Tumbleweed. But… That’s my own fault, as I just update almost daily… And too many times I’ve done an update that breaks nvidia. I can’t speak to this issue with leap, as I’ve not run Leap on my machine with an nvidia card.
Add comment